In telecommunications, a femtocell, originally known as an Access Point Base Station, is a small cellular base station, typically designed for use in residential or small business environments. The femtocell is a user-deployed home base station (BS) that provides improved home coverage and increases the capacity for user traffic using a backhaul connection to a service provider, such as an Internet Protocol (IP) connection over the user's Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), cable, satellite, fiber-optic, or other high-speed or broadband connection. Current femtocell designs typically support 2 to 4 active mobile phones in a residential setting. Due to co-channel or adjacent-channel operation, it is very challenging to address interference between nearby femtocells or between femtocells and an existing macrocell, that is, a cell in a mobile phone network that provides radio coverage served by a power cellular base station (tower).
The prior art and currently proposed solutions for femtocell interference management assume that femtocells and macrocells are deployed by the same service provider or operator, and provide that power control algorithms on the femtocell side are used to prevent high levels of undesirable interference. However, power adaptation alone cannot solve the interference problem in all scenarios, and such solutions can require a femtocell access point to be equipped with an additional receiver (e.g., a user equipment (UE) type of receiver), which can increase cost and complexity. For example, an additional receiver may be needed for a femtocell BS to detect interference level and path loss information to set up its initial transmitting power.